April 01, 2008

I was checking out the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review online earlier today and ran across a short review of a new collection of black-and-white photographs: Driftless: Photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier. According to VQR, the subjects of Frazier’s work—migrants, slaughterhouse and factory types, people who live in trailers—“haven’t been defeated”; rather, they get their pleasure “in the form of deer hunting and pool halls, cigarettes, beer, and”—wait for it—“love.”

In the end, the magazine assures us, these poor Iowans manage to hold on to their “essential dignity.”

Christ Almighty. How much more condescending and clichéd can a review get?

I’ve told youbefore about the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport, Iowa, with Rock Island, Illinois. (Read about how Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Abe Lincoln all had their hands in the project.) But you’ve got to read the Chicago Press report of the first crossing, on April 22, 1856, to get a sense of how a big a deal this was. For instance, the paper begins its coverage with, of all people, Julius Caesar (excuse, if you can, the garbled syntax):

When Caesar with his legions crossed the Rubicon, which divides Cissalpine Gaul from Italy, he was well aware of the greatness of the work he was engaged in; and although many attempted to dissuade him from such an undertaking, yet nothing daunted he landed his array on the plains of Italy, astonished the world by his deeds—and left mankind an instance of bravery and enterprise worthy of record.

Et tu, Davenport?

We, too, however, have crossed the “Rubicon”—the great “Father of Waters”—which for centuries has rolled on into the bosom of the mighty ocean without a pier to mar its progress. To-day has the mighty deed been accomplished at which the world has so often smiled in derision. Yes, the Mississippi is practically no more. It is spanned by the mighty artery of commerce and enterprise—the railroad. Science has stretched its arms across the ever-flowing Mississippi—and along its fine-knit muscles has the “iron horse” bounded with a heavy snort as it scent from afar the sluggish waters of the Missouri. The mission of Caesar of old was to conquer; so that of the Caesar of the nineteenth century; but the latter is one of peace and plenty. The “war horse” of civilization may have fiery nostrils, but it has an olive branch, the seeds from which it scatters as it flies.

The New York Daily Times, which ran a story on April 28, was not given to such melodrama. It lopped off those two grafs from the Press’s coverage and began here:

That such an event should have occurred without an assemblage of spectators from all quarters of the globe to witness it, is only another instance of the mighty progress which has been made within the last fifty years in the science of bridge building. As we approached Rock Island there were rumors afloat that we would cross to Iowa on the bridge. “Cross the Mississippi on a bridge!” cried an intelligent looking gentleman. “On a bridge?” simpered a feminine voice from a young lady to her parents, bound for Council Bluffs; “why, Pa, I thought the Mississippi was a great river, larger than the Hudson.”

The Times went on to provide specs of the bridge, blah blah blah, but cut the big moment—when train meets bridge! So back to the Press:

Swiftly we sped along the iron track—Rock Island appeared in sight—the whistle sounded and the conductor cried out, “Passengers for Iowa keep their seats!” There was a pause—a hush, as it were, preparatory to the fierceness of a tornado. Tho cars roared on—the bridge was reached—“We’re on the bridge—see the mighty Mississippi rolling on beneath”—and all eyes were fastened on the mighty parapets of the magnificent bridge, over which we glided in solemn silence. A few minutes and the suspended breath was let loose. “We’re over!” was the cry, “we have crossed the Mississippi in a railroad car.” “This is glory enough for one day,” said a passenger, as he hustled his carpetbag and himself out of the cars.

March 31, 2008

It is often said that Bix Beiderbecke was mentioned in print but once or twice in his lifetime. While this isn’t true, it nevertheless took until January 23, 1938—or six and a half years after his death—for the New York Times to take notice of his life. And then it was only in a letter to the editor. The occasion was Benny Goodman’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, which critics today suggest marked the birth of swing but which the Times then only sniffed at. This is the attitude that got Robert B. Tufts of White Plains, New York, all het up.

As to your decision that swing is just a passing fad, due soon to fade, ne’er more to return, you might be interested in knowing that swing (the real article) has been played well on for twenty years now and will continue to be played for many, many years to come. Of course, swing has been lionized by the public at large only within the last three years or so, but, gracious sakes! real musicians such as King Oliver, Louie Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke, to mention only a few, were playing authentic swing years and years before this. The public stage of swing may, as you gloomily predict, soon die out, but there’ll be plenty of musicians who will carry on the torch for years to come.

To hear Goodman’s homage to Bix from that concert, check out the Bix Mix.

I’m reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—a gorgeous and disturbing experience, for while the 2006 comic-book memoir is “breathtakingly smart” and “eloquent,” to quote Time magazine, which named it the year’s best book, and “Proustian,” to steal from the New York Times, it’s also wrenching and difficult and left me, in places, a little shattered.

This is often the point of a good book and nearly always the point of literature. A few sensitive souls at the University of Utah, however, have deemed it pornography and want it removed from the English curriculum there.

A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown in a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book.

[Anti-porn group leader Thomas] Alvord says, “It’s like they’re turning their back and pretending graphics, depiction of oral sex, are not an issue.”

Imagine that! To the university’s credit, they will not give in to such pressure. The book is too good. It tells the coming-of-age story of Bechdel’s own coming out, and it does so in the long shadow of her parents’ unhappy marriage, her father’s secret homosexuality, apparent pederasty, and subsequent suicide. Or was it a suicide? Nothing comes easy in this book, and Bechdel looks to James, Proust, and Wilde, among others, for guides to telling and understanding her story—which is about death and family and sexual identity and memory and, finally, about storytelling itself.

March 26, 2008

The comparison between World War I and Vietnam is interesting, and my observations on it tie in to the fact that it was often the civilians, not the veterans, who didn’t want to talk about the war.

To begin with Vietnam: as both of us remember, it took a while for the public to come to terms—however impartially—with that war. As veterans know, especially wounded veterans, the hatred with which civilians treated returning soldiers in the late 1960s changed to a vast indifference in the 1970s. People just didn’t want to hear about it, or talk about it—much as no one wants to talk about the fighting in Iraq now. Although The Deer Hunter came out in 1978 and Apocalypse Now in 1979, it was not really until the mid-1980s that discussion of the Vietnam War intensified to the point that the public was able to process it and make some sense of where it fit into our history. Since then, I think that historians and popular writers have done a fairly good job of discussing it frankly and revealing something of its true nature.

Much the same thing happened after 1918, as we’ve been discussing. The difference is that Americans never came to terms with that war in any real sense. Yes, isolationism, the Great Depression, and World War II intervened; but there’s more to it than that. In part, we need to remember that the culture was different in the 1920s than it was in the ’70s or ’80s. On the one hand, there was the sense that “polite people don’t talk about that sort of thing”—so that while from time to time people would speak of the plight of impoverished veterans, especially after the Bonus March of 1932, no one wanted to discuss the brutality and degradation of the actual fighting. On the other, society became dominated by the escapism of the Roaring Twenties—Bix Beiderbecke’s heyday—and didn’t want to discuss the ugliness of the past.

In Europe, along with Canada and Australia, 1929–30 brought a turning inward, a kind of national introspectiveness, when books like All Quiet on the Western Front became popular. In America, apart from a brief blip of interest, nothing of the sort happened. Of course, we had not suffered as much as they had. But the almost frenetic optimism with which Americans have always liked to look at the world also played a heavy role.

In conclusion, the answer is that I have no answer. Most everything I’ve said has been speculation. Even if the why is unanswerable, though, I think it’s clear that this ignorance of our past, and the willful forgetfulness of a whole generation of Americans, is something that we need to overcome.

I appreciate all of your excellent questions and look forward to our discussion later this week!

March 25, 2008

I had planned to say a few words about Colm Tóibín’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. I thought Tóibín, much less a historian than a literary man, was an interesting choice of reviewer for a book that seeks to reappraise the Second World War. My thoughts on that are summed up in the comments section at Charlottesville Words. More interesting is this colorful rant from my friend Rick:

Brendan, the review in today’s New York Times on Nicholas Baker’s new book brings to mind much of the reading I’ve been doing the past two years. It has to deal with the nature of terrorism, and in particular, state terrorism. It’s easy to write about authoritarian monsters such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. They provide easy access to narratives that comfort our sense that we stand outside the scope of such heinous deeds.

But when I read A. N. Wilson’s two-volume British history—starting with Queen Victoria’s era, and covering in volume two the first fifty years of the 20th century, ending with WWII and the demise of British Empire—it was clear that previously assumed heroic figures such as Winston Churchill were anything but. He comes across as a war-mad little drunkard, a pompous class-addled ass willing to mass murder people of Mesopotamia, India, the Sind . . . you name it. That fat little fucker loved to use the British Air Force to lay waste to civilian populations, rationalized by the idea they were uncivilized.

Gore Vidal, who’s work is imperfect but still impressive in scope—especially his historical saga that begins, chronologically, with Burr and ends with the Kennedy era—has similar judgments to make. Then, there’s the case of James Carroll, whose recent history of the Pentagon lays more blame with the United States for the Cold War than he does the Soviet Union.

Clearly, in the work of Wilson, Vidal, and Carroll, we are not “the good guys.” I believe indiscriminate use of Air Force bombing raids over civilian targets is a form of terrorism. And, I believe, our country’s leaders feel a lot easier in using this kind of war. Clearly, the United States gets upset when half a dozen of our finest are killed in action. But if a thousand or who-knows-how-many are killed by indiscriminate bombing, and the major part of those people are civilians, hey, no problem.

I’ve never been a fan of Nicholas Baker’s work. I’ve tried two of his novels and they didn’t hold my attention. His attention to detail may be fabulous in its minutiae, but as a reader, it doesn’t engross me. Guess you gotta like that kind of stuff to want to read on. I prefer a good yarn. 600 or 700 dense and detailed pages by James Carroll, with a hundred pages of endnotes, were far more engrossing. But after reading the review in today’s Times, I may have to dip into Baker’s latest. We need to rub our faces in our own complicity in world terror, and stop pretending that this country is beyond such perfidy.

I’ve read three or four of Baker’s books and they did hold my attention. I continue to laugh remembering the pornographic scenes in The Fermata, and I thought Box of Matches sublime. But I’m skeptical of Human Smoke. The form is literary (hence Tóibín as a reviewer) and designed, perhaps, to invoke feeling more than thoughtful consideration. Why not write a history if yours is a historical argument? And if it is not primarily a historical argument—if it is, for instance, primarily a political argument—why couch it in history?

March 21, 2008

I appreciate your reluctance to moralize about war. You could safely say that war is hell (to quote Sherman) or, less safely, that it has an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (to quote the Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien). But since you weren’t there, that wouldn’t be history; that would be ideology. You can only go on what the soldiers say.

There’s more to be said on that, but I’d rather, and I’m sure you’d rather, we moved on. Toward the end of To Conquer Hell, you write that “the Meuse-Argonne opened a lasting perception gap in American society. On one side stood the combat veterans; on the other, everyone else.”

Of course, that perception is nicely illustrated in our deciding to leave the nature of war up to those veterans. But it’s more than that, obviously. What you describe is an environment eerily like Vietnam-era America, where returning soldiers were shunned, where they felt out of it for all that they had seen and could not explain their experiences to their loved ones. “I became a citizen,” one Doughboy recalls, “but not a good one.” “War does something to a person,” another soldier testified. “We were scared, but we had to develop a numbness and an unfeeling attitude toward it all. Otherwise, we would have lost our minds.”

In the end, most soldiers just kept quiet—but not, you argue, “because they didn’t want to talk, but because nobody seemed willing to listen.” War memoirs were huge in Europe and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was translated into English in 1929. But while high quality books by American veterans were being written and published, the American public just wasn’t buying them.

Why do you think that is? And why do you think, for instance, that Vietnam was different? After all, that war launched many a writer, Tim O’Brien not least among them. Whatever the answer, the resistance to the war that you’ve mentioned more than once seems to be a phenomenon that started right away. And that fact, for me anyway, makes it no less in explicable.

The upshot, you write, is that the Doughboy “never became as fixed in the American public imagination as the Tommy in Britain, the digger in Australia, or the Poilu in France.”

Who was he? At the war’s beginning, he was like any other American soldier in any other era—young, confident, naïve, eager for adventure, and mostly believing in the cause and country for which he fought. Perhaps the only thing that set him apart in 1917 was his immigrant roots. By the end of 1918, however, he had become something very different and unique. Of all the soldiers in American history, the Doughboy is the first to have experienced industrialized warfare. He did so without preparation of any kind—military or psychological—and suffered terribly as a result. Yet no other solider in American history or perhaps the history of the world learned how to fight in such a short period of time. Over a period of just a few months, four million volunteers and draftees endured, adapted, and finally overcame all obstacles to become first-rate soldiers. In the process they lost some of their youth, confidence, and naivete. But they had shown, far more than any number of generals, diplomats, or politicians could ever have done, that America had an important role to play on the world stage.

This strikes me as an eloquent tribute to the long-neglected Doughboy. The dominant narrative in American pop and political culture is that we saved the Europeans’ butts in the First World War and then again in the Second. Your tribute, and your book, are no worse for complicating that portrait.

Thanks for participating in this conversation, and I very much look forward to your talk next week.

March 20, 2008

Perhaps the earliest definition of funky is recorded in a brief glossary in Time’s cover article on Dave Brubeck (8 Nov. 1954): “Funky, adj. Authentic, swinging.” A week later, Walter Winchell strictured, “Time mag goofed with its jazz glossary. Said ‘Funky’ means authentic swing. Real hipsters say it means old-time rickety jazz” (San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 15 Nov. 1954). Obviously, the downhome connotation was being extended by a rebirth of feeling in jazz. The celebrated Bix Beiderbecke was said to have been funky because of his careless personal habits. “It was not just a joke that jazz clubs have been and are called ‘toilets.’” So the adjective was transferred to the rawness, the earthiness of blues played in closely packed, often unventilated, seven-day-sock joints with clogged plumbing, in which most black and white jazzmen have been sentenced to employment.

What seems strange is that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would connect these bits of pop culture to a political theorist like James Burnham, a former Communist who believed that the managerial class—not the workers—were going to take over the world. Which was not a bad insight, but Schlesinger was never impressed. In the March 16, 1953, issue of the New Republic he accused Burnham of being a man “in permanent apocalypse, a catastrophic thinker whose tiresome prophecies of doom can only dazzle once. He is the Bix Beiderbecke of our political journalism, only he has hit that high note once or twice too often.”

As far as strange Bix references, this one ranks right up there. Is it pluriactive? Okay, maybe not. But either way, it got me to wondering whether there is a Bix Beiderbecke of anything anymore. Oh wait. Eminem, for those who haven’t heard, is the Bix Beiderbecke of rap. But who would today’s Bix Beiderbecke of political journalism be?

About the Banner

The banner image is a detail from Grant Wood’s “Young Corn.” Now owned by the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Community School District, it was painted in 1931: the same year Bix Beiderbecke died and a year after Wood painted “American Gothic.”